Wednesday night’s main event in Toronto Summer Music was Teiya Kasahara’s The Butterfly Project performed at Walter Hall.  Teiya’s introduction was most interesting.  For them, the project is about exploring their Japanese-ness.  As the child of a Japanese father and a German mother growing up in Vancouver that’s inevitably a complex thing.  When it gets combined with opera and, specifically, Puccini’s “Japanese” travesty Madama Butterfly it gets really complicated.  So The Butterfly Project raises some really interesting questions; for Teiya ones related to being a to-some-extent-Japanese performer of works like MB, for me ones related to why this opera fascinates people like Teiya when, frankly, I’d be happy to bin it.

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